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Revolution in the head

Tom Stoppards RocknRoll is a radical triumph, says John Peter

Tom Stoppard has written one of the great political plays in the English language, and like all great political plays, it resonates with humanity. It has a moving, throat-catching intensity that reminds me of Arthur Miller summing up Tennessee Williams’s plays as “the politics of the soul”. Stoppard has always been a hard-line humanist, and this play shows him at his combative and tolerant best. Proust thought that art was the true last judgment, which is pushing it a bit, but Stoppard shows that great theatre is the nearest you can get to it on this bitch of an earth.

The play is set in Cambridge and Prague from 1968 to 1990. Max (Brian Cox) is a philosophy don and an old-fashioned communist who didn’t leave the party in 1956, when Khruschev crushed the Hungarian revolution, or in 1968, when Brezhnev crushed the Prague Spring. Max despises the idea of